14 Mar Pi Day

Pi Day is an annual celebration commemorating the mathematical constant π (pi). Pi Day is observed on March 14 (or 3/14 in month/day date format), since 3, 1 and 4 are the three most significant digits of π in the decimal form. In 2009, the United States House of Representatives supported the designation of Pi Day.

The earliest known official or large-scale celebration of Pi Day was organized by Larry Shaw in 1988 at the San Francisco Exploratorium,where Shaw worked as a physicist, with staff and public marching around one of its circular spaces, then consuming fruit pies. The Exploratorium continues to hold Pi Day celebrations.

On March 12, 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a non-binding resolution (HRES 224), recognizing March 14, 2009, as National Pi Day.

For Pi Day 2010, Google presented a Google Doodle celebrating the holiday, with the word Google laid over images of circles and pi symbols.

Larry Shaw

Pi has seeped into almost all parts of mathematics and other field like physics, chemistry and in even popular culture. The quest for Pi has evolved for more than four millenia now starting with Archimedes and still going on to the present day. In loose terms is the ratio between the circumference and diameter of any circle. It is a great mystery to everyone that such a concept has become omnipresent in things that have almost nothing to do with a circle. For this and many more reasons is invariably the favourite constant for almost all mathematicians over the world. The present day usage of the Greek letter to represent this ratio was put forward by William Jones and later made popular by Leonard Euler in his book on infinite series and its analysis.

Among the many remarkable properties that this number enjoys the most prominent ones are that it is irrational and transcendental. An irrational number has no decimal representation that recurs while a transcendental number is never the solution of a polynomial with integer coefficients. These facts were proven by Hermire and Lindemann in the 19th century.

For thousands of years, mathematicians have attempted to extend their understanding of π, sometimes by computing its value to a high degree of accuracy. Before the 15th century, mathematicians such as Archimedes and Liu Hui used geometrical techniques, based on polygons, to estimate the value of π. Starting around the 15th century, new algorithms based on infinite series revolutionized the computation of π, and were used by mathematicians including Madhava of Sangamagrama, Isaac Newton, Leonhard Euler, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and Srinivasa Ramanujan.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, mathematicians and computer scientists discovered new approaches that – when combined with increasing computational power – extended the decimal representation of π to, as of late 2011, over 10 trillion (1013) digits. Scientific applications generally require no more than 40 digits of π, so the primary motivation for these computations is the human desire to break records, but the extensive calculations involved have been used to test supercomputers and high-precision multiplication algorithms.

Pi has also become a part of many things in the popular culture including a movie named after it and innumerable characters in many videofilms and feature films named after it. A favourite pastime of mathematicians and amateurs is to memorize the digits of Pi. This has given rise to a section in the Guiness book of records too.

So, for all these reasons and many more we wish you a very Happy Pi Day 2013!

And if you are interested in memorizing the digits of Pi, here are a few: